Solitude can become loneliness as easily and fluidly as the sky changes while you’re busy inside — suddenly you are aware that the light has changed completely.
I feel I may be developing a new sensory organ for detecting that shift as it’s happening. It lives next to my liver, where the right side of my rib cage is chronically restricted. It processes interior weather continually, though I wish sometimes it could live outside of me, in a vessel among my plants, where I can monitor its liveliness or pallor.
So yeah, maybe writing, and specifically this writing, is a way of exteriorizing that loneliness organ. Which feels especially taxed lately (this might become a monthly newsletter for a while). Solitude tips over into loneliness more often for me lately. Some days I think I’m projecting my ominous feeling on the world; maybe I didn’t get enough sleep, maybe I have been watching too many shows. Some days, like today, when I have had good sleep and enough to eat and am feeling starkly decisive, I think, No, it’s not just me—there is something bad happening.
Maybe I am still carrying the weight of the last few years. I don’t want everyone to feel heavy and sorrowful all the time. I think we need to celebrate and to forget, if only to let our bodies rest in darkness for six or eight hours each day (though even darkness is fading). But I feel more and more disconnected from people whose lives seem, via social media, to have carried on in happy pursuit of material and social achievements.
I’m not on social media except for an Instagram account I made for my bodywork practice. I made the mistake (so it now seems) a while ago of using that account to search for people who have totally fallen out of my life since I deleted my personal social media accounts. I suppose I was looking for some evidence that they are feeling the way I have been feeling—a bit more isolated, and quite a bit more hopeless about the entire economic and corporate social apparatus to which we have dedicated our personal and collective time. But it appears to be quite the opposite, which increased my sense of disconnection.
I feel grimly reassured by statements like this one: “Of course we're anxious, of course we're depressed—we're living on a dying planet” (Adam Andros Aronovich, Healing from Healing). At least in these doom sentences, there’s acknowledgement and acceptance of the way I’ve been feeling.
Maybe this is just another case of a bodyworker taking on some collective pain — although, at the same time that I feel emotionally more isolated from certain social spaces, I’m working through deep and years-old restrictions in my upper spine and shoulders, and I feel a new range of movement, more internal connection, less tension, more physical comfort. My peripheral vision feels more expansive because I can turn my spine with less effort.
I read recently about kamzor — “bodily weakness that is experienced by women who feel that their contribution of labor and care is unreciprocated by their kin or wider milieu.” I think about how our maladies and the approach to treating them are often culture-bound — Western medicine might call kamzor chronic fatigue. I like thinking about kamzor, “a mode of embodiment that is both social and relational,” with respect to loneliness, which is a bodily and psychic acknowledgment of a rift in relationality. I appreciate how organizations like Healing from Healing are starting conversations about the essentially relational aspect of healing in a culture dedicated (because profit) to isolating illness and burdening the individual with their own care.
I’m not going to be able to offer any firm conclusion, or “solutions,” but I do think, or maybe I need to believe right now, that putting out a signal of discontent in a world hell bent on performing unnecessary and exhausting labors in hopes of accruing abstract capital will be helpful, in some way, if only briefly, to others who have lost the thread of the mainstream narrative.
<3,
Evelyn